I'm looking for some good server maintenance software that can be easily searched/sorted/shared(preferably web based.)


I'd like to track software changes and hardware changes. Would prefer it to run in a Linux environment but we do have a few windows servers to track as well.

I have 100+ servers and we are about to add 54 more so maintenance logging is getting out of hand. Any good free software out there that anyone who maintains many servers can recommend?

thanks!

Don't know what you are looking for...but for server monitoring we use nagios

http://www.nagios.org/

There is also cacti...

http://www.cacti.net/

You can use these to monitor various services that are running on your server (including but not limited to) HTTP/S SSH FTP NTP, etc

You can also set up a logging server...that way you only have to go to one server to view the logs.

Here, we have our logging server and our nagios server on the same machine

-C

Yes I have nagios and cacti to monitor the servers. What Im looking for is to track software addition/subtraction and hardware addition/subtraction that I manually do.

Ah, now I understand...

The only one that I know that is close to what you want to do is tripwire...

http://www.tripwire.com/

...Other than that...I don't know...

-C

Hmm that looks expen$ive. Did I mention it needs to be free?

There is a free version...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Source_Tripwire
http://sourceforge.net/projects/tripwire/

-C

There is the DIY option. This isn't a reccomendation in your situation, but if you get close with, say, nagios, you might then think of trying filling the gaps with something like:

• a script that checks what is installed (rpm -qa, seems like a good place to start on an rpm system)
• you probably want to get the conf file for anything installed
• while you are there, check what is actually running (ps -ef) just to document whether you have services installed that aren't running or that you intended to run but have crashed
• and a copy of all the run level stuff that starts up services

From a hardware POV, you'd want to get something like hwinfo, lsdev (not quite sure what is provided on centos, try 'man -k hardware' for a good start point).

Now, given that package of info, you'd want to have it somewhere safe, if that machine does go pear shaped and a way of indentifying to which machine it belonged (would including the IP in the filename make sense?). And, of course, even if you do want a local copy, you want a copy somewhere else as well. (If you only make changes infrequently, which I guess would be the ideal case, writing a new version just before you run a backup might be enough).

Although with the number of servers that you have, I think I'd be looking for something for something more professional which probably implies more paid-for.